GitHub Ships Stacked Pull Requests so Developers Stop Rebasing Branches Manually
GitHub's native stacked PRs hit public preview, letting teams split large changes into reviewable layers that merge in one click without manual rebasing
- Public preview live: GitHub stacked pull requests are now available to all repositories with no waitlist or paid plan required.
- One-command setup: Install via
gh extension install github/gh-stackand create your first stack in under a minute. - Auto-rebasing: GitHub handles cascading server-side rebases automatically when a layer merges, eliminating the biggest pain point of manual stacked workflows.
- Full CI and branch protection: Every layer in the stack runs the same checks and enforces the same rules as a direct PR to
main. - Squash/rebase merge caveat: Repos configured to squash or rebase merge by default should switch to merge commits to avoid stack identity tracking breaking.
- Merge queue support pending: Merge queue integration is rolling out progressively over the coming weeks, not all at once.
GitHub just shipped something developers have been hacking around for years. Stacked pull requests are now in public preview, available to every repository with no waitlist, no enterprise plan, and no third-party tooling required. One CLI extension install and you're in.
The rebase tax, finally abolished
If you've ever shipped a large feature on GitHub, you know the two bad options: open one giant PR that nobody wants to review, or split it into dependent branches and spend your evenings manually rebasing five branches in the right order every time main moves.
Neither option is great -- one means a PR that takes forever to review, the other means splitting work across multiple branches you have to keep manually rebasing.
This isn't a new idea -- Facebook engineers have had it since 2007 via Phabricator, and tools like Graphite built entire businesses around bringing it to GitHub. What's new is that it's now first-party. That distinction matters enormously: reviewers need nothing installed, no third-party account, no browser extension. The stack lives inside GitHub itself.
How it actually works
A stack is two or more pull requests in the same repository, where the first (bottom) PR targets the stack's trunk -- usually main -- and each subsequent PR targets the branch of the PR below it.
Think of it as a dependency chain where foundational changes go at the bottom and code that depends on them -- API routes, UI components -- goes higher up.